Modern Language Initiative imprint: 45 books
The Writing of Spirit
Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science
Language: English
Release Date: May 1, 2017
Contemporary thought has been profoundly shaped by the early-twentieth-century turn toward synchronic models of explanation, which analyze phenomena as they appear at a single moment, rather than diachronically as they develop through time. But the relationship between time and system remains unexplained...
by Jörg Kreienbrock
Language: English
Release Date: October 10, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: October 10, 2012
Why do humans get angry with objects? Why is it that a malfunctioning computer, a broken tool, or a fallen glass causes an outbreak of fury? How is it possible to speak of an inanimate object’s recalcitrance, obstinacy, or even malice? When things assume a will of their own and seem to act out against...
Prophecies of Language
The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2016
The scenes of Babel and Pentecost, the original confusion of tongues and their redemption through translation, haunt German Romanticism and Idealism. This book begins by retracing the ways in which the task of translation, so crucial to Romantic writing, is repeatedly tied to prophecy, not in the...
Committing the Future to Memory
History, Experience, Trauma
Language: English
Release Date: November 11, 2013
Whereas historical determinacy conceives the past as a complex and unstable network of causalities, this book asks how history can be related to a more radical future. To pose that question, it does not reject determinacy outright but rather seeks to explore how it works. In examining what it means...
Post-Mandarin
Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2017
Post-Mandarin offers an engaging look at a cohort of Vietnamese intellectuals who adopted European fields of knowledge, a new Romanized alphabet, and print media—all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. This new generation of intellectuals established Vietnam’s modern anticolonial...
Beyond the Mother Tongue
The Postmonolingual Condition
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2013
Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned “mother tongue” about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing...
Standing by the Ruins
Elegiac Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2011
Since the mid-1970s, Lebanon has been at the center of the worldwide rise in sectarian extremism. Its cultural output has both mediated and resisted this rise. Standing by the Ruins reviews the role of culture in supporting sectarianism, yet argues for the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic of resistance...
Bilingual Brokers
Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital
Language: English
Release Date: April 3, 2017
Reading Asian American and Latino literature, Bilingual Brokers traces the shift in attitudes toward bilingualism in postwar America from the focus on cultural assimilation to that of resource management. Interweaving the social significance of language as human capital and the literary significance...
Iterations of Loss
Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish
Language: English
Release Date: February 25, 2015
In a series of exquisite close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, Jeffrey Sacks considers the relation of poetic statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries....
Writing of the Formless
Jose Lezama Lima and the End of Time
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2016
In this book, Jaime Rodríguez Matos proposes the “formless” as a point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time. Thinking through both literary and political writings around the Cuban Revolution, Rodríguez Matos explores the link between abstract symbolic procedures...
The Historical Uncanny
Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2014
The Historical Uncanny explores how certain memories become inscribed into the heritage of a country or region while others are suppressed or forgotten. In response to the erasure of historical memories that discomfit a public’s self-understanding, this book proposes the historical uncanny as that...
Receptive Spirit
German Idealism and the Dynamics of Cultural Transmission
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2016
Premised on the assumption that the mind is fundamentally active and self-determining, the German Idealist project gave rise to new ways of thinking about our dependence upon culturally transmitted models of thought, feeling, and creativity. Receptive Spirit elucidates the ways in which Kant, Fichte,...
Hollow Men
Writing, Objects, and Public Image in Renaissance Italy
Language: English
Release Date: March 20, 2013
This book relates developments in the visual arts and printing to humanist theories of literary and bodily imitation, bringing together fifteenth- and sixteenth-century frescoes, statues, coins, letters, dialogues, epic poems, personal emblems, and printed collections of portraits. Its interdisciplinary...
At Freedom's Limit
Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament
Language: English
Release Date: May 26, 2014
The subject of this book is a new “Islam.” This Islam began to take shape in 1988 around the Rushdie affair, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the first Gulf War of 1991. It was consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. It is a name, a discursive site, a signifier at...